Texas-based Dell Technologies has expanded its edge technology to help retailers generate more value and deliver enhanced customer experiences from data generated in retail locations.

From grocery merchandising and kerbside pickup to frictionless checkout and loss prevention, retailers have embraced edge technologies to keep pace with industry demands and create better customer experiences.

A recent study by 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, and commissioned by Dell, found this growth would continue with 77% of retailers expecting to increase edge deployments significantly in the next two years. However, without a holistic approach, new technologies across wide geographies and locations can lead to complex and siloed systems that drive up a retailer’s IT management cost.

“Retailers are increasingly relying on IT technologies and data at the edge to offer more personalised and intelligent customer experiences that drive better business outcomes, dramatically accelerating the need for retailers to bring together siloed technologies,” said Gil Shneorson, senior vice president at Dell Technologies. “We’re helping retailers easily consolidate these technologies so they can analyse data where they’re created, make faster decisions and deliver positive experiences for in-store shoppers and employees.”

Added capabilities from Dell bring together edge technologies, so retailers can easily manage and scale their infrastructure from data centres to the edge, and launch in-store and digital AI applications from partners to deliver better in-store experiences.

The Dell Validated Design for Retail Edge simplifies and consolidates edge retail infrastructure and applications onto a single infrastructure stack for efficient deployment, management and support. With VMware Edge Compute Stack integration, it provides retailers with a single management view of edge IT across all retail locations to track system health, build and manage applications at the edge, and help securely scale to additional sites.

By working with Deep North and its intelligent video analytics platform, it supports AI-based applications that help retailers use data insights to improve in-store shopping experiences such as optimising product placement, preventing product loss, tracking inventory, helping shoppers avoid long checkout queues, and diverting employees to where they can be of most assistance in a store.

“We are excited that Deep North’s real-time video analytics platform supports the Dell Validated Design for Retail Edge,” said Rohan Sanil, CEO of Deep North. “We look forward to helping retailers leverage AI to gain line-of-sight into the path-to-purchase in-store to identify opportunities to create a better customer experience, improve store operations and drive sales.”

Dell says it continues to introduce additional edge innovations across its infrastructure portfolio to help organisations simplify deployments and capture more value.

Customers and partners can conceptualise and collaborate on edge technologies and applications in the Dell customer centre innovation labs.With a new lab in Round Rock, Texas, the collaboration hubs help customers test existing edge technologies and design custom proofs-of-concept that can manage the workload demands of organisations in retail, manufacturing, healthcare and other verticals. For example, retailers can validate and test inventory tracking prior to implementation in store locations for fast and simple edge deployments.

Enterprise Sonic Distribution 4.0, a scalable and agile open sourced-based network operating system, now extends across data centres and to the edge.With network switches that can connect across multiple sites, customers can deploy, manage and monitor their edge with familiar data centre tools. It provides streamlined operations, flexibility, and expanded business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities. For example, with the seamless networking integration Sonic 4.0 provides, retailers can more easily manage their infrastructure from their data centre to retail stores and other edge locations through a single, unified fabric.

“Retailers have one chance to deliver a positive in-store experience, and they have to balance this with helping to ensure the right inventory, health of their employees and customers, security of the store and more,” said Dave McCarthy, research vice president at IDC. “Dell’s edge solutions can help retailers of all sizes gain faster, easy access to real-time insights that help make stores work in more intelligent ways to deliver better customer experiences.”